B-36 Mosquito 1/72 Tamiya

The British de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito multipurpose aircraft was built in 1938-1940 and entered service in 1941. It was used as a light bomber, night and day fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. Its mostly wooden construction and high flight speed earned it the nickname “Wooden Wonder”. The Mosquitos FB Mk.VI and T.Mk.III were in the Czechoslovak service in 1945-1953 under designations B-36 (CB-36).

To all 1/72 scale fans well known Tamiya kit was created in 1999, and the De Havilland Mosquito FB Mk.VI/NF Mk.II version was the first released box. The flaws of this kit are perhaps also well known to the public, they are mainly the joints on the separate nose halves, that needed to be glued to the fuselage halves, only minor details in wheel wells, a few general simplifications, a few ejector pin marks, and – for Tamiya classic – thick decals. There is a need for some putty and sand work on this kit, but it’s nothing serious, it just makes an otherwise quite comfortable construction a bit unpleasant. I completed my model with a few etchings in the cockpit (seat harness and some flight controls) and of course the antennas. The decals of the Czechoslovak commander Mosquito are from an old (nowadays unavailable) TallyHO! decal sheet. It also includes stencils, I only replaced the tail cockade, which was too small, with a more suitable decal from my spare parts (I did not solve any other minor possible errors in the decals, but this only one was annoying me). However, you can buy new decals for our Mosquitos from DKdecals, you will find quite plenty of them on the decal sheet, including this one. I still plan to build a night radar version from the RAF 68. Squadron, but this particular kit is hard to find at the moment – maybe a new model kit will be released by a Czech company sooner, as I can manage to find a radar Tamiya kit – according to reports on the Internet, the WIP is intensive… For those interested in the Czechoslovak Mosquitos, I would recommend the two Jakab AERO magazines no. 6 and 7 by Miroslav Irra, where you can find almost all available photos, including descriptions of the differences between the operating variants used by the Czechoslovak Air Force.